Michigan trailed North Carolina 51-37 at halftime, then got outscored 17-2 to open the second half. The Wolverines went on to lose, 86-71, to No.11-ranked North Carolina on Wednesday night at the Dean E. Smith Center in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge.

Charles Matthews had scored 61 points over his last three games for the Wolverines, but he failed to rise to the occasion as well. He made his first three shots, but finished 5-for-10 with 12 points, three assists and four turnovers.

“He pressed a little bit and tried to do too much,” Michigan coach John Beilein said of Matthews, who sat out last season after transferring from Kentucky. “People are going to gear up with him. Now he’s on the radar screen as a guy that can score points.”

North Carolina was coming off a historically bad shooting effort in a 63-45 loss to Michigan State on Sunday in the PK80 tournament in Porland, Ore. The Tar Heels shot 1-for-18 from three-point range and 24.6% from the floor against the Spartans.

“Losing on Sunday didn’t hurt them one bit,” Beilein said of North Carolina. “They came with a real vengeance towards us, towards the Big Ten or whatever. We did not answer. We couldn’t answer.”

The Tar Heels shot 64.5% from the floor (20 of 31) in the first half, their highest percentage of any half this year.

The Wolverines began the game hitting their first eight shots, but cooled off, hitting 33.3% of their shots the rest of the first half (7 of 21). The Tar Heels eventually pulled away.

Any chance of a second-half comeback ended after the Wolverines were outscored 17-2 to fall behind 68-39.

After shooting 46.7% from three-point range in the first half, the Wolverines shot 15.8% (3-for-19) from long range in the second half.

“This is like the Montessori experience,” Beilein said using a loss as a teaching moment. “The kids go in there, they feel it, they touch it, they smell it. Now they know what it’s like afterwards.”

Wagner made 9 of 13 shots from the floor for the Wolverines.

“It scares you to death the way they shoot the ball,” North Carolina coach Roy Williams said of the Wolverines. “It scares you to death the way their big guys play. Wagner was a lone force. We didn’t do a very good job on him at all. They made a bunch of their threes early, and then they missed more of them because they missed than because of our defense.”

“We got a great team,” Matthews said. “I’m not pointing fingers at nobody. I’m sticking with my guys to the end. Yes we did lay an egg today, but I’m still going to ride with these guys to the end.”

Matthews said the Wolverines started missing shots in the first half and the Tar Heels continued to make theirs.

“We gotta find a way to dig deeper,” Matthews said. “The games like this, you’re playing in a national championship atmosphere,” Beilein said. “You can’t be like ‘let me just try this shot or make this play that’s not there.’

“I don’t think we were ready for the quickness and the speed and the precision that they run with and we weren’t locked in defensively. I can’t tell you why. We’ve seen it before. We gotta shore it up.”

Luke Maye, who came in averaging a team-high 19 points for the Tar Heels, scored a game-high 27 points on 11 of 16 shooting for the Tar Heels. Joel Berry II added 17 points and Kenny Williams scored 11 of his 12 points in the first half for North Carolina (6-1).

“Luke Maye’s a really tough match-up for us,” Beilein said. “We were playing really small with Duncan Robinson as a skinny four man. It was really a bad match-up and that really hurt us.”

Contact George Sipple: gsipple@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @georgesipple.